games

[cellio]

Yesterday we went to Robert and Kathy's to play games. Dani wanted to play Twilight Imperium, a space game that he says is more strategic than tactical (unlike the space-combat games like Starfleet Battles), but we had the pesimal number of players for that (5) so we played Age of Renaissance again. I played London for the first time; playing a naval game where it's hard to make a mad dash for the middle east was novel. (I had been hoping to play Venice.)

We also played a new (to us) game called Vinci. It's sort of an abstraction of Civilization, kind of. Each civilization in the game has two randomly-assigned advances; these determine both special abilities and how many units you have. When you start a civilization, you enter the board (abstraction of Euope) anywhere you like and expand for as long as you can. (There is a simple, deterministic system for conquering teritories.) You score after each turn (different advances reward different things -- e.g. you want to have lots of farm land if you have irrigation or whatever the farming advance was called). When you think you've reached the point of diminishing returns, you can declare your civilzation to be in decline, abandon it in place (it'll keep scoring for you as long as it exists), and start a new civilization. It's a fun game, and took us about 2 hours to play. I think experienced players would play in under an hour and a half.

Comments

Starfleet Battles...

[goljerp]

a space game that he says is more strategic than tactical (unlike the space-combat games like Starfleet Battles)

I always thought that Starfleet Battles was more about arguing over rules than tactics. But then again, maybe it was just the people who I used to watch play (several of whom are now Lawyers...)